A BRAZILIAN hospital says a patient has been left legless after going into an operation to amputate his right leg and having doctors remove his left.

Marilda Santos is the spokesperson for Rio de Janeiro's Pedro Ernesto University Hospital. She says that on Friday doctors were supposed to amputate the right leg of Antonio Cesar Victorio, who suffers with diabetic kidney failure, but instead they removed his left leg.

"When the patient's daughter told doctors they had removed the wrong leg, they amputated the other leg as well.''

She says the hospital is trying to determine if doctors committed a medical error or if they "removed the left leg because it too was compromised by the patient's disease.''

Victorio's daughter told the O Globo newspaper that the family plans to sue.